Saturday, February 28, 2009

Berkshire net sinks; Buffett says economy in shambles

Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Warren Buffett's insurance and investment company, barely broke even in the fourth quarter because of losses on derivatives contracts tied to the stock market.

Profit fell 96 percent, the fifth straight quarterly decline, and Berkshire's net worth tumbled $10.9 billion in the year's final three months. Net worth per share fell 9.6 percent in 2008, only the second decline since Buffett began running Berkshire in 1965. It fell 6.2 percent in 2001.

My View:

The Oracle of Omaha once famously said "Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction". A person who is ideal of so many people around the world (not only US) did not practice what he preached! Derivatives if could be personified would have answered like this - "see, you called us financial weapons of mass destruction, now you will be the sure victim, AND we will target your reputation more that your wealth".

My respected Buffet has been faltering for quite some time and I once wrote my reaction in my indexviews blog about why Buffett could be advising wrong things. You can find that here.

U.S. securities regulators on Friday accused Texas billionaire Allen Stanford, his college roommate and three of their companies of carrying out a "massive Ponzi scheme" over at least a decade and misappropriating at least $1.6 billion of investors' money.

My View:As I've once already expressed my explanation on why these SCAMS are getting exposed one after the other, its simple - its a result of bad economic times. The fact is in times of perpetual fake prosperity there were these brilliant brains working overtime to figure out new and newer ideas with which they could cheat people. Now when time is not that good (remember, the real bad time is still to come) these scams are getting exposed one by one.

The biggest ponzi scheme will be exposed not now. It will be a surprise to masses but not for sane people (I don't mean masses are insane, they are credulous though). This scam is under progress and its being done on war scale !!! Yes dear readers, this scam is govt sponsored crisis postponement plan.